The HR field is vast and ever-evolving. HR professionals can grow their knowledge by attending webinars, local meetups, and industry networking events. Many HR practitioners start as generalists but may eventually specialize in recruitment, learning and development, payroll or employee relations. Selecting an HR specialism is often based on personal preference and enjoyment.
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Saves Time
In HR, the number of hours spent searching for candidates, sourcing and recruiting talent can quickly add up. An applicant tracking system for small business centralizes all hiring activities and automates workflows to save HR managers time, money and effort in their recruitment efforts. When you use an ATS to manage your candidate pool, the initial matching process helps recruiters focus on only those applicants who match the job description. This allows you to hire faster and better. With an ATS, you can keep top candidates engaged by consistently communicating application status updates throughout the hiring process. This helps boost the candidate experience and is a great way to set yourself apart from competitors! This kind of engagement isn’t possible without an ATS.
Saves Money
HR can be costly and time-consuming, especially for small businesses with limited resources. Using an applicant tracking system with pay-per-module pricing is the best way to keep costs down and still get your company the best talent.
Complying with employment laws and regulations is another significant challenge for small business owners. Streamlining processes like paperwork and e-verifying crucial documents can help you stay compliant and free up your team’s time for more important tasks. Often, payroll isn’t seen as part of HR, but it’s essential to running your business. Streamlining payroll processing with an easy-to-use document management tool can save your HR manager or office staff time and money while giving your hourly employees peace of mind.
Increases Efficiency
HR is a large, complex and important job. However, the responsibilities often feel overwhelming to small business owners. In addition to hiring and training, HR tasks include legal compliance with anti-discrimination laws, family and medical leave provisions, record-keeping requirements, workplace safety standards and more. Many small businesses outsource their HR functions to companies specializing in payroll, HR consulting, employee benefits or recruiting. This option can save time and money, but your company must take the right steps to ensure its success. An ATS can help you become more efficient by eliminating manual processes and automating data-driven analytics. For example, an ATS that integrates with your onboarding system can automatically change candidate profiles to employees and avoid the need for duplicate data entry.
Reduces Bias
Unconscious bias can negatively impact your hiring decisions, leading to a lack of diversity in the workplace and potentially legal problems. An ATS can help reduce this by providing an objective, data-driven approach to selecting the best candidate for the job. Reducing bias with an ATS can prevent mistakes like the “halo and horn” effect, wherein one particularly good or bad trait distracts you from assessing the person’s overall competence. It can also help you avoid discrimination against a group of people, such as a certain race or gender. It can also help to have multiple people involved in the decision-making process to minimize affinity bias, where you favor candidates with similar backgrounds or experiences. This is a big reason group interviews are common in many hiring processes.
Increases Candidate Engagement
With the COVID-19 pandemic driving more job-seekers to retire early, quiet quitting, and a tight labor market, building and sustaining strong candidate engagement is more important than ever. That includes authentically communicating with all applicants, including those rejected or who turn down your offer. An ATS can help you do this by sorting through applications and providing applicant reports that allow you to identify quality metrics. This gives you the data to make hiring decisions quickly and efficiently. As a small business, you have many responsibilities to manage. Don’t let HR admin eat up time that could be spent on the important stuff like building a great candidate experience. By streamlining processes and automating tasks with an ATS, you’ll be able to spend more time on the things that matter most.